A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali is a novel, but also a gravestone. "Most of the people in it are dead," says Gil Courtemanche, his rugged and slightly dissolute face a monument to years of hard smoking and hard drinking. "And the few who are still alive were among their killers."
That is to say, his book is filled not so much with imaginary characters as with ghosts bearing a resemblance to people who once lived.
Courtemanche's book is one of the first attempts to fictionalize the unthinkable, the 1994 Rwandan genocide in which over 800,000 members of the minority Tutsi tribe were slaughtered by the majority Hutus.
He was not in Rwanda during the massacre, but he knew the country well and had many friends there. Six years earlier, disillusioned with his work as a Montreal TV journalist, he had signed on with a non-governmental organization, chronicling the spread of AIDS in Africa. He visited Tanzania and Gambia and finally Rwanda. There, he found an especially sympathetic community of people, and stayed as long as he could.
"I've heard journalists say that if you're lucky in the people you meet, you're a great journalist. I was lucky. I met missionaries 60 or 70 years old giving out condoms and asking the Pope to forgive them." He also met Méthode, the AIDS victim who, in the novel, assures his mother he will have "a beautiful death;" and Cyprien, who will be hacked to death on top of his wife's body six years later; and a beautiful girl named Gentille, who will become the heroine of his novel.
But this was 1988, and the genocide was far in the future. In the following six years, Courtemanche returned to Rwanda several times to visit his friends and roll documentary film footage about them. When the genocide finally began, in April of 1994, it occurred to him that the people he had filmed were now very likely dead. And several months afterward, in January of 1995, he went there to find out.
Of 30 friends he sought out, 27 were dead. "And the other three were murderers, including Frère Sourire, a little guy four feet tall, a health worker, and just about the most generous guy I knew. He killed his patients."
Back in Montreal, he settled into a period of soul-searching. Le Devoir hired him as a columnist, and occasionally he would discuss books touching on Rwanda. But the event quickly moved out of the headlines. He wanted to make a film about it, "but nobody was interested." He thought of writing a book analyzing the genocide, "but there might be 500 people who would read it." So he spent his time instead remembering his friends, and racking his brain to understand what happened. He'd grab hold of anything that seemed to offer an explanation, such as an experiment carried out at Stanford, where subjects were given roles as prisoners and guards, and those playing the guards almost immediately became brutal.
He noticed how often people blamed other groups for their miseries. "My daughter was seven years old, and one day she came home from being punished at school, and she said to me, 'Do you think my teacher did this to me because of the English?' "
He winced every time a talking head on TV referred to the murderous instincts of Africans. "I noticed they never talked about Germans that way."
Having never before written fiction, it took Courtemanche several years to realize that was the direction in which he was moving. There was a morning when he looked through his old notes from Rwanda, "and I found two pages written in 1988, and they became the beginning of the book."
These pages describe the little clutch of aid workers and French paratroopers around the swimming pool of the Hotel des Milles Collines as the jackdaws gather in the trees at happy hour, and a former justice minister flirts with prostitutes: "He wants to beguile because he doesn't want to pay."
At this point, Courtemanche began to invent. He imagined the scene being observed by an embittered Quebec journalist named Valcourt, and he moved the time forward to the winter of 1994, when the plans for the genocide are well advanced.
Of course, the assumption has been that Valcourt is Courtemanche, but the author insists it's not so. "He is the most fictional character in the book. I was too shy even to ask Gentille to share a drink." Valcourt also tries to save her from the genocide ("I would not have the courage to do that"), and in the end, unlike his creator, Valcourt stays in Rwanda.
Fiction didn't solve all the difficulties of journalism. Courtemanche still had to explain who the Hutus and Tutsis were, and how they had lived peaceably for centuries until the Belgians arrived and instilled European ideas of physical racism (the Belgians preferred the tall, golden-skinned Tutsis to the rotund, dark Hutus). It all seemed didactic and unwriterly, and he abandoned the project for nine months.
Then Courtemanche remembered reading a passage written a century earlier by a Belgian doctor who had speculated that the Tutsis were so beautiful that they might once have been a white people. This fateful argument influenced the Belgian government to educate and empower the Tutsi minority, even as the Hutus were reviled. "One day I began to imagine what would have happened if a Rwandan Hutu had read that passage a half-century earlier. And what if that Hutu were Gentille's great-grandfather."
He called this character Kawa, and imagined that Kawa was tall for a Hutu. Convinced that the future is with the Tutsis, Kawa persuades his children to marry Tutsis, and arranges for the most Tutsi-appearing grandchildren to be given ID that erases their Hutu ancestry. These are the deadly papers carried by the tall and impossibly lovely Gentille, who must then try to persuade the Hutu executioners that she is, in fact, a Hutu.
That Kawa, who had tried to save his descendants, instead sent them into an abattoir is only the first of the book's deadly ironies. Another is that it is Valcourt who prevents Gentille from leaving the country, out of a desire to marry her and stay there with her.
Some critics have fastened on this aspect of the story as implausible. Why would he not hasten to take her to Montreal? Why would he, knowing better than most what a crater Rwanda was becoming, wish to stay there with her?
To answer this, Courtemanche reaches into his own history. As a roving journalist, he once took up with a Haitian woman younger than himself. She was a doctor, confident and well educated, but when she arrived in Montreal she was seen as a Third World woman who had hitched a ride to Canada on her husband's passport. She found it impossible to adapt, and the relationship was short-lived. Valcourt, says Courtemanche, "wants to live with Gentille in a country where they could be seen as equals."
Much of the book's flavour comes from its satire of aid officials and minor diplomats who try not to notice the misery because they are so enchanted by having servants. This, Courtemanche says, was not exaggerated. After a day working with people dying of AIDS, he recalls, he had a visit from a Canadian official "who told me his wife was very happy, they had found some kitchen tiles which she really liked. Did I want to come and look at them?"
For Courtemanche, the current attack on Iraq is the "kitchen tile" story writ large. How can a Western army persuade itself that it is "freeing" a country even as it uses cluster bombs that inevitably blow the arms off children? The answer, he suggests, is that the coalition army is so well protected that it is taking virtually no casualties. "Iraq makes me feel sick, because we have seen this before. In these societies, because of the poverty, people feel an immediate sense when danger is imminent. And we don't feel that."
But, he adds, "I am optimistic in the long run. We tried to eliminate the Jews and now they have their own country. In the long term, we can make good things happen. And they last longer than the bad ones."